Fine Art: Behind The Scenes On A Game Pitch

Tendril is a studio that was hired three years ago by Ubisoft Toronto to help sell a game idea to Ubisoft's HQ in Paris. That game is Starlink, and their pitch involved all kinds of work, from "preliminary vision" through to concept development, ship design, environments and even a trailer.

"The trailer we created had to demonstrate core gameplay (explore, navigate, collect, rescue) while also demonstrating the range of fantastical and gorgeous environments the game would host", Tendril say. "For the trailer, we developed the story beats, built the universes from scratch, developed the Skimmers significantly based off low poly models from Ubisoft, and brought it all together into an exciting one minute trailer."

An interesting aside is that the project was originally called Onward. I kinda like that name more than Starlink, which sounds like something I'd pay $5 for on Steam.

Note that the trailer isn't the same as was seen at E3. This was a trailer made purely for internal purposes, so that one part of Ubisoft could convince another that this was a game worth making (which, hey, success).

Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios.